Sounding the Gallery

Video and the Rise of Art-Music

Holly Rogers

Description

Becoming commercially available in the mid 1960s, video quickly became integral to the intense experimentalism of New York City's music and art scenes. The medium was able to record image and sound at the same time, which allowed composers to visualize their music and artists to sound their images. But as well as creating unprecedented forms of audiovisuality, video work also producedinteractive spaces that questioned conventional habits of music and art consumption. This book explores the first decade of creative video work, focusing on the ways in which video technology was used to dissolve the boundaries between art and music.

Sounding the Gallery

Video and the Rise of Art-Music

Holly Rogers

Table of Contents

Introduction1 Composing with Technology: The Artist-Composer2 Silent Music and Static Motion: The Audio-Visual History of Video3 Towards the Spatial: Music, Art and the Audiovisual Environment4 The Rise of Video Art-Music: 1963-19705 Interactivity, Mirrored Spaces and the Closed-Circuit Feed: Performing Video Epilogue: Towards the Twenty First CenturyIndex

Author Information

Sounding the Gallery

Video and the Rise of Art-Music

Holly Rogers

Reviews and Awards

"Video art is conventionally approached from the perspective of the visual arts. By approaching it from a musical perspective--by foregrounding its time-based nature--Rogers rethinks it as a practice that drew on, synthesised, and transformed developments already under way in? both visual and musical culture. In short, she rethinks video art as video art-music. Drawing on art history and media studies as well as musicology, this impressively wide ranging and perceptive study addresses fundamental issues of generic identity and authorship, places video art-music both historically and in terms of its sites of consumption, and reveals its indispensibility to an understanding of contemporary digital media." --Nicholas Cook, University of Cambridge

"With the new audiovisual turn we need to think more deeply about the relations of sound and image. Holly Rogers's magisterial Sounding The Gallery covers the key early period of the 1960s and 70s, when vanguard artists brought their video-art music works into new spaces, including the gallery (which often didn't know what to do with them). No other monograph so precisely describes the labors of practitioners like John Cage, Allan Kaprow, Yoko Ono, Nam June Paik, Pipilotti Rist, and Bill Viola, nor provides such provocative discussions of technological specificity, genre-specific practices, reception studies and economic contexts. Required reading for us all." --Carol Vernallis, author of Experiencing Music Video: Aesthetics and Cultural Context

"A lucid and thorough introduction to the very particular kind of sound, image and technology that burst into being in the early 1960s." --The Wire

"Both comprehensive and immensely readable...The bibliography alone is worth the price; anyone interested in video artwork during the formative years of the discipline should start here. Rogers knows the field inside and out, and she writes in an accessible style that makes her book attractive as a course text. Authoritative, concise, and extremely
well thought out, this is the key book on this subject at this time...Essential." --Choice